What seems like fairly boring tasks, pulling the staples, scraping off the glue, and starting to sand are actually the time your boat makes one of its fastest transitions. I always feel the raw strips, pumped full of staples, looks pretty bad. Just pulling the staples it looks better, and everything you do from now on will make it look better and better.

Sometimes when fitting strips on a strip built boat you have space where multiple strips intersect. So, instead of having one simple taper, you have a combination of two different tapers. Here I show the process of creating that fit.

"Can I make a 10' kayak from a 17' kayak by decreasing the form spacing." or similar, is one of my more commonly received questions. The reason for asking may be that the questioner only has a 12' long work shop, or they don't want to put a longer kayak on their Mini Cooper or they just don't want a long boat.

During my vacation a few weeks ago I took some time to get my first kayak out of the basement storage at my parents place in Maine and took it for a paddle. It was interesting to see that some of the things I still do, appeared on my first efforts.

Like any project, you can build a kayak quickly, or you can take pains with every step. While I am a big advocate of working quickly so you can get the kayak finished and start paddling, when I build custom boats for clients, I work with a bit more patience. This video shows some of the steps I took to make a bespoke kayak for a client. Many of the steps shown here are the hard way to do things.

Smoothing the interior of a strip built boat is always a challenge. A random orbital sander usually doesn't fit the curved surface well and risks digging horseshoe shaped divots in the wood. What I find works well for me is a really sharp paint scraper shaped to match the surface, and hand sanding with very rough sandpaper.